02.06.26Fluency is the Bridge to Comprehension: Video from Amplify’s “Science of Comprehension Symposium”
Fluency is a bridge to comprehension
I had the pleasure of presenting at Amplify’s “Science of Comprehension Symposium” on Friday. My topic was the often overlooked role of fluency as a bridge to comprehension.
I showed some videos and I wanted to post them here with a few notes.
First, this beautiful clip of Gabby Woolf reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
After building a bit of background knowledge, Gabby reads aloud, beautifully and expressively… bringing the story to life and giving students a clear mental model of what Stevenson’s prose sounds like. They can use this model to guide their own silent reading later.
Next she goes to FASE Reading, calling on students to read aloud in their most expressive voice for short unpredictable durations. You can see them copying and adapting Gabby’s model.. quite beautifully and enthusiastically. Lastly she sends them off to read in pairs. Now that they’re practiced expressive reading as a group the quality of their pair reading is extremely high.
Now here’s Maggie Johnson who does a lot of similar–and similarly lovely–things in this clip while reading.
You can see her beautiful model reflected in her students expressive reading.. and in the joy the shared story creates. This segment remind us that one of the best ways to get students interested in the hard work of reading is to cause them to see their peers doing so…. and taking pleasure in it… and just maybe in allowing them to feel connected to the group via shared reading.
Last here’s Hannah Lofthus.
When Cartier brings his A-game to FASE reading, she stops and asks him to go again. She wants to celebrate prosodic reading and thus cause students to do more of it. And Cartier responds. He punches it up even a little more in his re-read. And when Mahogany goes next, she is NOT going to be out done.
If we want to build cultures of shared expressive reading to build both fluency and comprehension, celebration is as important as correction.
Before I finish a small note. In all three of these classrooms there’s not a screen in sight. It’s high text low tech all the way.